Ron Brown's Loose Lips Seal His Fate

by J. Orlin Grabbe

1. The April 1996 issue of The American
Spectator contained an article "Why Ron Brown Won't Go
Down". Shortly thereafter, on April 3, both Commerce
Secretary Brown and his plane went down while on a
landing approach to an airport in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Thirty-four other passengers were on board.

2. Ron Brown--who at various times has been
under investigation by the Commerce Department
Inspector General, the FDIC, the Justice Dept., the House
Government Reform and Oversight Committee, and the
Senate Judiciary Committee--was only two weeks away
from being indicted with respect to a bribe paid by
Oklahoma company Dynamic Energy Resources. "I am
too old to go to jail," Brown loudly proclaimed. "If I go
down, I'll take everyone else down with me." Brown
assumed the threat would force Democratic bigwigs to
rally around him, to make sure that the charges he faced
were buried in an appropriate fashion. But Brown
miscalculated. His own words buried him instead.

3. Brown was flying in the same equipment that
had ferried Hillary Clinton around Bosnia the week
before. The aircraft had taken no intervening flights

4. The plane was a "T-43A" that had undergone further
modification. ("T" stands for trainer. The ordinary T-43 is a
military version of the Boeing 737 used to train navigators.
It has two yokes--one for the pilot and one for the copilot--and
has a number of navigator stations in the rear of the aircraft
for the student navigators.)

5. Brown's plane was one of two planes in the
fleet not equipped with a Black Box. It was, however,
already wired for a Black Box, and the latter could have
been purchased and put in place for the occasion for a
mere $80,000 or so. (The wildly varying costs estimates--
in one case $6 million was cited--are speculative noise.) It
is against Air Force regulations to transport government
officials of diplomatic status or higher without a Black
Box. Clearly, someone wasn't doing his job.

6. Landing visibility was good. This was reported
by two pilots who landed immediately ahead of Brown's
flight. One of these pilots has had more than 8000 hours
flying experience. The statements by Lt. General Howell
Estes--carried on CNN and elsewhere--about visibility
problems and terrible conditions of wind, rain, and fog, are
either simply erroneous or constitute sheer disinformation.
("The Pentagon finally told that old fart to shut up," one
source says.) Similar statements such as those by Don
Phillips in the Washington Post that "the plane was
fighting . . . poor visibility when it slammed into a
mountain" (A28, April 12, 1996) also seem to be part of a
active disinformation campaign.

7. "If you are even a quarter mile off course, the
tower begins screaming at you," says a pilot who has
flown into that airport. To be off more than two miles is
impossible without having generated a great deal of
control tower radio traffic. What do the tapes show with
respect to Brown's flight?

8. The control tower tape is missing. While very
suspicious, this could simply represent an attempt by
someone to secure crucial evidence. However, there is a
backup cylinder which keeps a backup copy of all traffic
for up to three months. This backup cylinder is also
missing. "The missing backup cylinder shows that this
was a professional job," says a source highly connected in
the intelligence community.

9. The maintenance chief for navigation systems at
the airport, Niko Junic, is said to have subsequently
committed "suicide" at home, on the Saturday after
Wednesday's crash of Brown's plane. Junic is said to have
shot himself in the chest, an unusual choice of techniques.
His medical records show him to be a very stable, reliable
individual.

10. Brown's plane made its approach to the airport
from Tusla in the northeast. But part of the plane ended
up on the mountainside about 10 miles southeast of
Dubrovnik, while another part ended up in the water
roughly 18 miles away--about five miles northwest of
Dubrovnik in the Adriatic. This indicates the plane came
apart at fairly high altitude.

11. CIA trawlers have recovered part of the
wreckage in the water. This, along with the wreckage on
the hillside, not only shows unmistakable evidence of an
explosive blast, but the type of detonator ("descending
detonator") that set it off. The downing of the plane was
no accident: it was a deliberate act of sabotage.

12. When President Clinton appeared on camera
to announce the disappearance and death of Ron Brown,
his nose and eyes showed unmistakable signs of recent
significant cocaine usage. Did the President need a lot of
lines to get courage to face the public? Or was this just
one more example of the type of hubris that led to
Brown's demise?

13. Like Brown himself, those responsible for his
death have apparently miscalculated. Two of the most
powerful organizations in the U.S. government have now
decided that enough is enough, and they aren't going to let
the cover-up of the Brown assassination continue.